Lucy Crown (17 page)

“No,” said Jeff.

Oliver shrugged. “Whatever you say. As you get older, you learn to treat money more carefully, too.” He smoothed out the check, looked at it absently, then with a sudden movement threw it into the fireplace. “Incidentally—that phonograph is yours, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Jeff.

“I think you’d better take it with you,” Oliver said. “Now. And anything else around here that belongs to you.”

“That’s all there is,” said Jeff.

Oliver went over to the phonograph and snapped out the plug. He wrapped the cord neatly around the instrument and tucked the plug firmly through the twist of wire. “I think you’d better stay away from here from now on, don’t you?”

“I’m not making any promises.”

Oliver shrugged. “It makes no difference to me. I was merely thinking of your own peace of mind.” He tapped the phonograph. “Here we are.” He waited, smiling pleasantly. Jeff, his face set, came over and put the machine under his arm and started out. As he got to the door it opened and Lucy came in.

After Lucy had left the house, she walked blindly down toward the lake. She stopped at its edge, staring out across the water. The clouds had parted a little and there was pale, wet moonlight picking out the tips of branches, the pilings at the end of the hotel dock, a mast on one of the small sailboats tied a few feet off the end of the dock.

It was cold along the edge of the water, and Lucy shivered. She hadn’t put on a sweater and she couldn’t go back into the house now and get one.

She thought of what the two men were saying to each other in the living room. She tried to imagine the conversation, but it was impossible. In other times and other places, men had killed each other in situations like this. Not only in other times. She remembered a story she had read in a newspaper a month or so ago. A sailor had come home unexpectedly and found his wife with another man and had shot them both. Then he had shot himself. It had been all over the front pages for two days.

Well, nobody was going to shoot anybody else in the living room. Maybe that was what was wrong with them. All three of them. Maybe something like this was only valid and worthwhile if people were willing to shoot each other as a consequence.

She turned and looked at the house. It looked exactly the same as it had looked all summer and the summer before. The light streaming peacefully, too brightly, through the curtains of the living-room window, making the wet grass gleam on the lawn in front of the house. And several windows away, the light was on in Tony’s room, shaded, from the lamp on his desk. She wondered what Tony was doing. Reading? Drawing his pictures of horses, boats and athletes? Packing, preparing to run away? Listening?

She shivered. Suddenly, she knew that the worst thing was going to be facing Tony, whether he was listening or not. She turned away from the house and looked out across the lake. How easy it would be just to walk out and keep going, out into the blackness, out into the simple blackness … Well, she knew she wasn’t going to do that, either.

She listened to the tapping of the water against the dock-pilings, small, monotonous, familiar, the same sound as last summer, as all the summers before that. She wished it was last summer. She wished it was any time before tonight. With everything to be done over again, and done better and more wisely, not with that insane, rushing, diving, automatic, dreamlike inventiveness. Or next summer, with everything settled, forgotten, punished.

She wished that they could go back a half-hour, to the moment when she came into the house and saw Oliver standing there, and knowing it was going to be bad, and being frightened of him and at the same time feeling that sensation of warmth and gladness that she always felt when she saw him after being away from him for some time, a sensation of rootedness, familiarity, connection, a subtle, comfortable relinquishment of the responsibility of being alone. She wondered if she could ever explain that feeling to Oliver, and explain that it could exist at the same time that she was making love with another man, at the same time that she was lying to him about it, at the same time that she was pretending to be outraged and innocent.

What she should have done when Oliver sent Jeff out of the room and accused her, was to get up and say, “Please give me fifteen minutes alone. I want to arrange everything exactly, correctly, in my mind, because this is too important to rush.” Then she should have gone into her own room, by herself, and thought it all out and come back and begged for forgiveness.

Only she hadn’t done that. She had behaved instinctively, like a guilty child, in a gush and brainless female flurry of tricks, thinking only of protecting herself for the moment, no matter what losses it would mean later on. Instinctively, she thought. Well, my instincts are no damned good.

When she went back into the house, she decided, she was going to make it all up. She was going to be calm and sensible and she was going to say, “Please forget everything I said tonight. Now, this is the way it happened …”

And she would also promise never to see Jeff again. She would keep the promise, too. It would be easy—because as soon as she had seen Oliver and Jeff together, in the same room, Jeff had vanished, he had become nothing, he had become once more just a nice little boy who was hired to teach her son how to swim and to keep him out of mischief for a few weeks in the summertime.

If only Oliver hadn’t been so stubborn, she thought, with a little twinge of anger against him, if only he had taken her home with him when she’d asked him to, in July, none of this would have happened. If he hadn’t complained that night over the phone about that garage bill. Let him take some of the blame, too. Let him understand that there were consequences for him, too, in always making other people do what he wanted them to do. Let him understand that she was a human being, not a block to be pushed, a piece of material to be shaped, that her feelings were signposts, danger-signals, appeals, and were to be considered.

Maybe this was all to the good, she thought—this event—this, this accident. Maybe, she thought optimistically, this will shake our marriage into its proper final shape. Maybe from now on, the rights and privileges and decisions will be more equally divided.

She saw shadows moving across the light, behind the living-room curtains and she wondered what the two men were saying about her, who was attacking her, who defending, what judgments they were reaching about her, what revelations, criticisms, what plans for her future. Suddenly, it was intolerable to think of them alone together, debating her, exposing her, settling her. No matter what happens, she thought, it is going to happen in my presence.

She hurried across the wet grass and into the house.

When she opened the door, she saw Jeff standing there, in the middle of the room, with his phonograph under his arm, ready to leave. He looked small and defeated and unimportant, and she knew immediately that whatever Oliver had wanted from him he had got.

Oliver was standing on the other side of the room, impassive and polite.

Lucy glanced once at Jeff, then turned to Oliver. “Are you through?”

“I believe so,” Oliver said.

“Lucy …” Jeff began.

“Go ahead, Jeff,” she said. She was still holding the door open.

Miserably, looking disciplined, Jeff went out, the bulk of the phonograph under his arm making him walk awkwardly.

Oliver watched him leave. Then he lit a cigarette deliberately, conscious that Lucy, standing rigidly near the door now, was following his every movement. “Quite a nice young man,” Oliver said finally. “Quite nice.”

I can’t go through with it, Lucy thought. Not tonight. Not while he’s standing there, looking amused. Not while he’s patronizing and in control. She felt herself shaking and she couldn’t remember what she had decided to do while she was out at the edge of the lake. All she knew was that she had to get through the next ten minutes somehow, anyhow.

“Well?” Lucy asked.

Oliver smiled wearily at her. “He seems … very attached to you.”

“What did he say?” Lucy demanded.

“Oh—the usual,” said Oliver. “I don’t understand you. You’re pure and delicate. It was all his fault. He’s glad it happened. It’s the greatest thing in his life. He wants to marry you. Very gallant. No surprises.”

“He’s lying,” Lucy said.

“Now, Lucy,” said Oliver. He made a tired small movement of his hand.

“He’s lying,” Lucy repeated, stubbornly. “He’s a crazy boy. He was up here last summer. I never even met him. But he followed me around, watching. Never saying a word. Just watching. All summer.” She rushed on, speaking very quickly in an attempt to overwhelm Oliver, to keep him from interrupting. “Then this summer,” she said, “he came up just because he found out I was going to be here. Then one night I did something foolish. I admit it. It was silly. I let him kiss me. And it all came out. How he was in love with me from the first minute he saw me. How he followed me. How he wrote me dozens of letters during the winter and didn’t mail them. How he couldn’t bear not to be near me. All the childish, extravagant things. I was going to call and tell you about it. But I kept thinking, if I told you you’d be worried. Or you’d make a scene. Or you’d think it was a trick on my part to get rid of him. Or you’d make fun of me for not being able to handle a boy like that myself. Or you’d say it’s just like her—always needing help and not being able to take care of herself like everybody else. I kept thinking, It’s only for six weeks, it’s only for six weeks. I kept him off. I used every trick I knew. I ridiculed him. I was bored, I was angry, I suggested other girls. But he was always there. Always saying, Eventually. But nothing happened. Nothing.”

“That isn’t his story, Lucy,” Oliver said quietly.

“No, of course not. He wants to make trouble. He told me himself. Once he even told me he was going to write you and say we were lovers so that you’d kick me out and I’d have to turn to him. What can I do to make you believe me?”

“Nothing,” Oliver said. “Because you’re a liar.”

“No,” Lucy said. “Don’t say that.”

“You’re a liar,” Oliver said. “And you disgust me.”

Her defenses overrun and all pretense suddenly abandoned, she walked blindly toward him, her arms out in front of her. “No … please, Oliver …”

“Keep away from me,” Oliver said. “That’s the worst part. The lies. The unforgivable part. After a while, maybe I could forget your summertime college boy. But the lies! Especially the lie about Tony. Good God, what were you trying to do? What kind of a woman are you?”

Lucy slumped into a chair, her head down. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said dully. “I’m so scared, Oliver. I’m so scared. I want so much to save us, both of us, our marriage.”

“God damn such marriages,” Oliver said. “Lying in his arms, laughing about me, complaining. Telling him between kisses that I was cold, I was a tyrant. With your son outside, peering through the window, because you were too eager to jump into bed to make sure the blinds were drawn properly.”

Lucy moaned. “It wasn’t like that.”

Oliver was standing over her now, raging. “Is that the marriage you’re so anxious to save?”

“I love you,” she whispered, her head still down, not looking at Oliver. “I love you.”

“Am I supposed to be melted by that?” Oliver asked. “Am I supposed to say now that it’s all right that you’ve lied to me for fifteen years and all right that you’re going to lie to me for the next fifteen? Just because, when you’ve been found out, you’re brazen enough to say you love me?”

“This is the first time,” Lucy said hopelessly. “I never lied to you before. I swear it. I don’t know what happened to me. You shouldn’t have left me alone. I begged you not to. You said you were going to come up and you never did. I told him I wasn’t going to see him again. You can ask him.”

Suddenly Oliver picked up his hat and coat and overnight bag. Frightened, Lucy looked up. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “I’m getting out of here.”

Lucy stood up, putting out her hand toward him. “I’ll promise anything,” she said. “I’ll do anything. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t.”

“I’m not leaving you yet,” Oliver said. “I have to get off by myself till I can decide what to do.”

“Will you call me?” Lucy asked. “Will you come back?”

Oliver took a deep breath. He sounded exhausted. “We’ll see,” he said. He went out of the cottage and a moment later Lucy heard the car start. She stood in the middle of the room, dry-eyed, drawn, listening to the sound of the engine. The door from the hallway was flung open and Tony came into the room.

“Where’s Daddy?” he asked harshly. “I heard the car. Where did he go?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. She put out her hand to touch Tony’s shoulder, but he pulled away and rushed onto the porch. She could hear him running down the road, his voice growing smaller and smaller, calling after his father, and the noise of the car diminishing and then vanishing in the distance.

12

F
OR THE NEXT TEN
days and nights, Oliver kept to himself as much as he could, spending as little time as possible in his office and avoiding all his friends. He gave the colored maid the time off, telling her that he was going to eat out, and she went down to Virginia to visit her family, leaving him alone in the house.

Each night, after coming home from the office, Oliver prepared his dinner and ate it, with austere and solitary formality, in the dining room. Then he neatly washed the dishes and went into the living room and sat in front of the fireplace until one or two o’clock in the morning, not reading, not turning on the radio, but merely sitting there, staring at the cold swept hearth until he felt tired enough to go to sleep.

He didn’t call or write Lucy. When he finally got in touch with her, he wanted to know exactly what he was going to do. All his life Oliver had come to decisions unhurriedly, after long and thoughtful examination. He wasn’t a vain man, but he wasn’t modest, either, and he believed in his intelligence and his ability to reach conclusions that would stand up to the test of events. Now he had to come to a conclusion about his wife and his son and himself and he gave himself time and solitude for the process.